The Aftermath of the C Cube
IV: Techies
"Group one proceed zero point five klicks northwest, spread formation. Engineer fifteen assist land factory three. Engineer sixteen construct Galactic Colossus, touchscreen-entered location."
The noise level surrounding Foaly's cubicle had been increasing day by day, and eventually Holly took it upon herself to march down the corridor to check on the vocal centaur. As she walked closer she could hear, more and more distinctly, a litany of military-sounding commands. What in the name of Frond was he up to? She knocked on the door once, twice. Then she decided that a sneaky entry was better suited to finding out what he was up to anyway. She opened the door a crack and -
"Group three regroup zero point two klicks south - no! no! retreat to base! Group three retreat to - D'Arvit! Engineers twenty to twenty-six patrol at - "
A bewildering sight met Holly's eyes. Instant food packets, wires, copper fragments, little magnets and other bits of random electronica were strewn about Foaly's massive engineering workdesk. Foaly's small lapcomp had been tossed aside to a corner of the cubicle, along with the docking station that normally resided next to his large whiteboard on a small office table. In its place was a small blue box placed next to a larger black box that vibrated and rumbled unhealthily, with a touchscreen at least three feet wide plastered across the whiteboard and secured with a dozen magnets randomly placed around its periphery. Foaly himself was standing in front of the screen, eyes glazed over, incessantly muttering commands, with a large pair of earmuffs - no, headphones over his ears.
Holly threw the door wide open with a bang, hoping to elicit a response from Foaly but getting none. She walked around the talking statue of a centaur to get a better look at the screen. Her confusion grew: was this a giant battle being depicted? This did not appear to be one of those fairy war history videos - or a human one, for that matter; the armies were all gleaming tanks and hulking humanoid robots with guns for arms, otherworldly structures and beam weapons which consistently failed to move at the speed of light, and the battlefield was obviously simulated (though quite realistic). And obviously Foaly himself was in no state to explain. The fine down lining his side, normally combed, was shaggy and disordered; his face was pale and his lips cracked.
Holly was a LEPRecon officer for a reason; she completed this assessment of her surroundings in under half a second and knew that there was only one thing to be done. She yanked the headphones off Foaly's head and screamed, "What in the name of Frond are you doing?"
Foaly blinked once, twice, and turned. "H - Holly?"
"I asked, what in the name of Frond are ... you ... doing?"
"I - isn't it obvious? I'm playing a computer game. Supreme Commander - PAUSE!"
Holly looked closely at the screen and saw that a blue rectangle had come up around one of the larger robots as Foaly yelled this last word. "CDR xXFoalyXx?" she mouthed. "What is this?"
"A computer game. You know? Game? Computer?"
Holly was confused. She knew what a game was: the sprites had their flight races and she was always up for a good game of Guard-Frond chess with Trouble. And she knew what a computer was: her small wrist-mounted touchscreen which displayed tactical information and routed communications from HQ during a mission. She started down instinctively at her arm.
"Ahh, you're looking at your wristpad. That's not a computer. This," Foaly stroked the little blue box with a tenderness that deeply discomfited Holly, "now this is a computer."
"Wait. Isn't that a C Cube? The one you were supposed to - "
"- destroy without leaving a trace." Foaly mocked Root's high-pitched purple-faced voice. "Yes, yes, what would a bunch of elves know about technology? Do you have any idea how hard it is for centaurs to have fun?"
"You tell me."
"The computer games of the Lower Elements are ridiculous! The last human game that the programmers bothered to port was Command and Conquer Two, and their own games are even sillier! For one, since the programmers are bleeding-heart elves, you can't kill anybody. And another, since the programmers are wonderfully emotive and imaginative elves, the graphics - if there are any - are extremely primitive. And finally, since the programmers are all wonderful elvish believers in the power of self-confidence, the hostile AIs - if there are any - are ridiculously easy to beat!"
"Yes, yes, but maybe electronics were designed for work, not - "
"EXACTLY!" Foaly roared. "The best electronics in the Lower Elements come from the LEP's own foundries - which I'm not allowed to control, out of regulatory safety, whatever that is - and what do you have? Oh, wireless communication chips. Tactical assessment chips. Biosensor monitoring chips. Neutrino power control chips - "
"On-the-shoulder chips," Holly muttered.
" - The last time anybody made a piece of integrated circuitry dedicated to any kind of graphical computations was in the fifteenth century! Then silly juvenile elves used them to project red tears onto human statues, and that was that."
Holly was tiring of this. "And so, when you stumbled upon a piece of technology that defeated your surveillance systems in half a second, you decided that the best use of it was to entertain yourself for weeks on end without leaving your cubicle."
"Yes. Yes! Voice recognition and multi-tactile touch-screen compatible input, two-point-five-eight terahertz equivalent clock speed across twenty-eight processor threads, graphics processing power off the charts with an entire gigabyte of dedicated video memory! I've already completed Crysis: Warhead on this baby with rendering rate never below sixty fps; those aboveground idiots think they're lucky if they hit thir - "
The LEPRecon standard operating procedures had exactly one recommendation for dealing with incomprehensible hostiles. Holly unholstered her Neutrino and, before Foaly could react, thumbed it to the highest setting and fired off three shots at the little blue cube.
When the smoke had cleared the cube had barely a scratch on it.
"Radiation resistant too, did I mention? Carbon fiber inlaid with beta-phase graphene all the ... "
And suddenly the black box beside it belched sparks in every direction before exploding in a loud bang.
Foaly turned to see Root standing in the doorway, blowing across the muzzle of his Neutrino for theatrical effect before holstering it. "Not much good for long without a power supply, is it?" he said, his eyes locked on Foaly's as they began to fill with tears.
"Sometimes it's not the techies who know what's the most important part of technology," he began to soliloquize, turning his back on the cubicle and starting to walk away. Then he paused.
"And Holly? It isn't just 'shoot first, ask questions later'. It's 'shoot everything first'."